An electronic design may be implemented by creating a specification of the functionality of the electronic design in a hardware description language (HDL) and translating the HDL specification of the electronic design into an implementation of the electronic design. Translation software may generate an implementation of the electronic design from the HDL specification of the electronic design.
The translation software may have options for directing the generation of an implementation of an electronic design. For example, translation software may have an option that specifies the generation of an implementation in a minimal amount of area for the circuitry of the implementation, and the translation software may have another option that specifies the generation of an implementation that has a minimal propagation delay along the signal paths of the circuitry of the implementation. An implementation generated with options to reduce circuit area may be quite different from an implementation of the same electronic design that is generated with options to reduce circuit propagation delay. Thus, translation software with many options may generate many different implementations of an electronic design depending on the options that are specified.
The circuit area and the circuit propagation delay are two quality metrics that may be importation for an implementation of a particular electronic design. The generation of an implementation of an electronic design may involve exploration of the options to achieve certain quality metrics that may include circuit area and circuit propagation delay. The exploration of the options may be an ad hoc process that generates a series of implementations until goals are achieved for the quality metrics, with the options for each successive implementation modified to address the shortcomings of the quality metrics for the preceding implementation. Tracking the options and the effects of the options on the resulting implementations may be difficult and time-consuming. For example, a designer may unintentionally select exactly the same options as were selected for a previous implementation of the electronic design.
The present invention may address one or more of the above issues.